Dark Men (17 page)

Risina shakes her head but I press the green button on the phone.

“Hello.”

“You’ve been asking about me.”

“You wanted to flush me, here I am.”

“You presume to know my intentions?”

“I know a few things. I’ll learn more.”

“I’ll help you out. Here’s a fact about me: I’m smarter than you.”

“That why you missed me outside the restaurant in Chicago?”

“Who says I missed?”

“It was sloppy.”

“Accidents are sloppy by nature. And sloppy by design.”

“And the police at Kirschenbaum’s house?”

“Now looking for a murderer who happens to fit your description.”

“Not exactly the way you drew it up.”

He chuckles, and the sound is disturbing in its confidence. “You don’t sound sure about that.”

He’s right. I don’t. Even this conversation feels like I’m being spun whichever direction he wants me to go.

“You want—“

But I cut him off in a clumsy attempt to gain control. “What’s your play?”

“I don’t—“

“Why kidnap Archie Grant? Why call me out by name?”

“You gonna let me finish?”

Is this how boxers feel as a round slips away? Right hooks coming but you’re just too slow or tired or old or rusty to get out of the way?

“Is he alive?”

“Check the phone.”

The phone beeps in my hand, an incoming text message. I click on it without hanging up the line and there is a picture of Archie holding a
New York Times
with a photograph of a blazing inferno on the front page—fire trucks out and about, spraying the flames down, and I have no doubt if I drive to a newsstand, it’ll be today’s paper. Archie looks defiant in the photo, a
fuck you
face if I ever saw one. I put the phone to my ear again.

“Satisfied?”

“Let me talk to him.”

“He doesn’t feel like talking.”

“What’s this about? Why the games? You want me, here I am.”

“You contact my wife again and I’ll blow Mr. Grant up in front of you. You’ll walk around a corner or step off an elevator and he’ll be tied up sitting in a chair. You’ll barely have time to register what is happening before parts of your friend slap you in the face.”

“Come on. You wanted to flush me? You flushed me. Let’s finish this out in the open.” Flailing. Too tired. Stumbling.

“You’ll be out in the open, Columbus. You won’t know where I’ll be.”

“Just tell me what this is about. I don’t mind spinning in circles, but at least tell me why I’m spinning.”

And right when I don’t think he’s going to say anything else, he surprises me. “Dark men.”

I’ve heard that expression once before, in a hotel room in the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles, from the lips of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Nominee for President, Abe Mann, moments before I killed him. “
When I had my problem with your mother, some dark men made that problem disappear. You understand about dark men, I take it . . .
” he had said.

He went on to tell me about the men who were the real players behind the politicians, the dark men who moved the representative’s mouths like ventriloquists, the dark men who wouldn’t let their candidates, candidates like Abe Mann, leave the game. So the Speaker of the House hired a killer named Columbus and designated himself as the target. His only escape was death, and I was his suicide method.

The dark men must not have been happy about that decision. All this time I was worried about someone in law enforcement tracking me down, but now I see my anxiety was misplaced. I killed the man I was hired to kill, but I upset the dark men who wanted him alive so they could keep pulling his strings. It seems they’ve held his death against me all these years and now they’ve hired Spilatro to exact their revenge. He went to them with my name and they said “bring us his head.” This changes everything.

Risina and I leave the house immediately, and instead of planning our next move, I just drive. The sun is heading west, dropping toward the horizon, so fuck it, I drive into it headlong, the light fierce in my eyes but maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe I deserve it. Maybe I’ve stuck to the shadows for too long and need to spend a little time with the sun in my eyes. Maybe some light will clean my fucking head.

Risina is pensive as she fights the urge to speak. Farms roll past the window, looking properly pastoral. After a moment, she pivots toward me. “What did he mean by dark men?”

“An old job. I probably upset a few apple carts.”

“So these men want revenge?”

“Yes.”

“And they hired Spilatro to kill you?”

“I think so.”

She nods. “Why him?”

“I think he went to them with my name.”

“You think Archie gave you up?”

I chew on the inside of my lower lip, and a new idea takes shape in my head.

“I don’t believe so . . . I think there’s a second explanation.”

“Give it to me.”

“What if these dark men work for the government? The CIA?”

“And . . .”

“And Spilatro was a soldier.”

“So?”

“So . . . what if he never left the military?”

We pull into a Hampton Inn somewhere outside the Berkshires. I switch cars at a used car lot, paying too much but not enough for the salesman to remember us. I choose a room at the inn on the first floor, in a corner with two windows and an outside door nearby in case we need to split in a hurry. I may not be all the way where I was three years ago, but I’m starting to take the smoothness off the edges.

After we make some bad coffee in the four-cup maker provided by the inn, Risina and I take a moment to sit and rest and think.

“You have that look in your eye.”

“What do you mean?”

“That same look you gave me that last day in our house before we headed to the US. You look like you want me to leave.”

“We’re entering new territory here. I’ve spent my professional life in a world I understand. A world of outlaws. Government agents are a separate entity entirely. They have resources I don’t have, access I can’t imagine. We have to work around the law . . . they break laws with impunity.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re in this together until the end. Spilatro knows about me. He’s probably known about me since we landed in Chicago.”

I nod. She’s right.

“If you tried to take care of this on your own, he’d find me and use me against you. There’s no sending me away. No hiding me somewhere. If you’re not watching me, then you won’t know I’m safe. And he’ll compromise you at a point when it’ll matter.”

I keep nodding.

“I love you. I’ll do whatever you tell me at this point. If you tell me to run, I’ll run. If you tell me to hide, I’ll do it. I’ll wait for you to come back to me. But it’s not the smart play, as you call it. He knows about me, and he knows you love me.”

“I do.”

“You’ll just have to be your best with me dragging on your back.”

“No.”

Her eyes flash. “What is this ‘no’?”

“No, I won’t drag you on my back. You’re going to have to step up and be the tiger I know you have inside you.”

She sets her jaw, and when she looks up, her eyes fill with resolve. “I can be a tiger.”

“You’re going to have to kill more than a squirrel.”

“I will pull the trigger when I have to.”

“Then let’s find Lieutenant Decker.”

CHAPTER TEN

W
e backtracked through the four files we had on Spilatro, the four hits Archie assigned. And there it was. The connections between all those jobs that Risina and I and Archie himself had failed to catch. The first hit, the rich female English professor at Ohio State, had helped finance a PAC set up to block government land use for military training in Ohio. For the second, the TV reporter had been working on a story about bribes involving the top senator from Illinois. The unlucky bookkeeper in the third file had more than a few Washington clients on his ledgers. And the final file? The police detective in Boston? The one Carla helped knock over? He would’ve testified against two NSA officials who were caught with hookers and cocaine at the Intercontinental in downtown Boston if he hadn’t slipped on the ice and had such an untimely accident. All Spilatro kills . . . all with government ties. And the fact that all those deaths looked like accidents was the icing on the cake. If they had looked like actual hits, actual assassinations, there would have been inquiries, scandal, attention paid. The dark men wanted these issues to disappear, not become headlines. Spilatro’s killing style was perfect for these kinds of jobs.

I wonder if Archie knew he was a patsy for the government, and to what degree he was playing ball. I wonder if he slipped and accidentally gave Spilatro my name, or Spilatro discovered it and then sought out Archie, worked his way inside. Used Kirschenbaum to make himself available to Archie, then worked a few government jobs for him to gain trust. I wonder how extensive the Agency is involved in the private killing business and how many of my assignments over the years were actually financed by taxpayers.

Finally, I look up the light rail accident in Cleveland, the one Carla claims to have discovered in her basement, the one where a section of the rail collapsed, killing the 14 passengers on board. Sure enough, three of the passengers worked for a top Defense contractor, McKnight International. Why the government wanted them dead, and what contract that helped to close, I have no idea.

But Spilatro works for Uncle Sam and has been all along, I’m now sure of it.

It takes her a week in DC. I remain uncertain on whether or not she’s capable of shooting a man in the head, but as a researcher, she’s extraordinary. This is an Ivy League-educated woman who built an impressive rare book collection by carefully researching titles, cross-referencing sources, compiling lists of potential dealers, wooing and cajoling and nudging reluctant sellers while she gathered the best information first, so she could swoop in and procure a title before her competition knew there was a deal to be made. My mistake, I’m beginning to realize, was grooming Risina to do what I do, to be a contract killer. I’ve been working with a natural fence the whole time.

She won’t need to blend in, to hide in plain sight; in fact, she can use her beauty to secure what she needs, to make men
want
to help her. She can use an arrow I don’t have in my quiver: she can be wholly unthreatening.

She made an appointment with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs at the Pentagon, posing as a freelance journalist. With the Presidential initiative for a more transparent government coupled with the Freedom of Information Act and countless journalistic precedents, it wasn’t difficult for Risina to gain access to enlistment records. She charmed the ASOD as she explained she was writing a heartwarming article on Desert Storm veterans who had parlayed their time in the service into high-end jobs. So much of what is reported in the mainstream media focuses on the negative, she told him—the combat fatigue, the stress disorders, the disabilities—she was hoping to chronicle the positive effects on veterans who served their country well and made something of their lives after their tour of duty, using the skills they learned in the military to achieve civilian success. The assistant secretary damn near threw his spine out of alignment bending over backward to help her.

Roland Deckman, aka “Decker,” and Aaron Spittrow, aka “Spilatro,” both joined the army in 1988. Like I said, most hit men aren’t too imaginative when they come up with their killing names, and Risina made short work of spotting two similar names in the same unit. They entered the 24th ID out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, one of the first units deployed to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990. When the Gulf War began, the 24th faced some of the fiercest resistance in the entire campaign, running up against the 6th Mechanized Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. They still managed to capture the airfields at Jabbah and Tallil. Deckman and Spittrow worked as infantry grunts, nothing unusual in their service records.

The ASOD apologized to Risina profusely, but contact information on Deckman and Spittrow was sketchy following their military service. They both were honorably discharged in 1992, and where most soldiers would at least have a few files of contact and discharge information, those files seemed to be missing for Deckman and Spittrow. Risina asked if there was contact information from
before
they joined the army.

The ASOD smiled. That, he had. At least for one of them.

Northville, Michigan is a quiet slice of suburbia outside of Detroit, with modest homes peppered around mansions. Although many neighborhoods in Detroit look as though they’ve been abandoned and forgotten, Northville could just as easily be situated outside Kansas City, Chicago, or Dayton. It is filled with regular folks making livings and raising families. Roland Deckman grew up here before he joined the army.

We drove straight to Michigan, taking shifts behind the wheel. Risina spent enough time driving in the States when she was in college that she isn’t intimidated by the width of our highways. In fact, she handled our sedan like it was primed for the Indy 500.

“Do you know what the fastest car in the world is?” she asked as we blasted through Ohio.

“What?”

“A rental car.”

Well, at least her jokes have gotten better.

It’s warm and rainy when we arrive, the kind of summer shower unique to Michigan that blows down like hell for fifteen minutes before it exhausts itself and retreats out to the lake.

We sit outside Deckman’s parents’ house. He’s now a government assassin, I’m sure of it, a breed of animal I’ve been fortunate to avoid until recently. He’s had training I’ve never had, supplies I can only dream of, access to targets that must be facilitated by entire teams of personnel and equipment, and a get-out-of-jail-free card that removes half the worry of making a kill.

But does he secretly despise his job? Does he question the political motivations behind his assignments? Does he rely too heavily on the system? Do his fortunes change with each new administration? And does this cement his loyalty to his friend Spilatro over his loyalty to his employers?